Philip Patrick

Should Ukraine be given a free pass into this year's football World Cup? Boris Johnson has given his support to the idea, but there's one downside: their entry into the tournament could come at the expense of Scotland or Wales. This hardly seems fair: Scotland will tonight feature in their first World Cup draw in 25 years; for Wales it is 64 years. Whatever the tragedy that has befallen Ukraine, it's wrong to expect Wales and Scotland to step aside. While we perhaps shouldn't take the notoriously football phobic PM at his word, far more football savvy commentators agree with Boris. Jim White in the Daily Telegraph called for Scotland and Wales to do the decent thing and withdraw, declaring that ‘Ukraine in Qatar is the thing everyone now craves’.

Contemplating leaders and their heroes can be a revealing business. Churchill had busts of Nelson and Napoleon at Chartwell (and a portrait of John Churchill by his bedside). Ronald Reagan had a bronze head of an anonymous cowboy in the Oval Office; Boris Johnson has a bust of Pericles (who took advice only from his mistress Aspasia) on his desk at No. 10. Napoleon had a bust of Hannibal. But what of Vladimir Putin? According to the man himself he owns several portraits and a ‘very beautiful’ bust of a certain Kano Jigoro. If you are neither Japanese nor a fan of martial arts that name may mean little. Kano Jigoro was the founder of Judo. But he didn’t just create a sport, he fashioned, according to Judo’s adherents, a philosophy of life.

'There are more important things in life than football,' said the Polish football federation as they announced their intention to boycott a crunch World Cup qualifier against Russia next month. Sweden and the Czech Republic, who meet on the same night for the right to meet the winner of that now severely at-risk tie, have also indicated their refusal to meet Russia. The English FA have made the same pledge ‘for the foreseeable future’ (potentially jeopardising the Women’s European Championship to be held in England in July); while the French association also issued a sympathetic statement.

A colleague has posted on the ‘Return to Japan’ Facebook page that his hotel quarantine at Tokyo’s Narita airport is set to be extended by ‘at least a week’. This is after testing positive with symptomless Covid on the point of his supposed release. He's already spent six days locked up in a tiny room with nothing but cold bentos (lunch boxes) for food. He now faces at least another week staring at the wall, worrying about whether his job will still be open when he finally emerges. In a sense my colleague is lucky. Thanks to his work visa, he will at least be allowed back into the country once he has established his non-Covid status. For many foreigners hoping to enter Japan, the borders remain firmly closed.

 Tokyo It is now 26 years since the doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyu (‘supreme truth’) carried out the worst domestic terrorist attack in Japanese history. Led by their leader Shoko Asahara, Aum released sarin gas on to the Tokyo subway, killing 13 and injuring 6,000. It remains the only time a weapon of mass destruction has been deployed by a private organisation. The details were sickening: one woman had to have her eyes surgically removed because the nerve gas fused her contact lenses on to them. Despite Asahara’s execution in 2018, the death cult has (somehow) survived, changing its name to Aleph and spawning two splinter groups. Aleph is small but appears to be in rude health, with 1,650 members, considerable cash reserves and several properties.

A young royal, seen as a potential future star, falls in love with a commoner and chooses to leave the gilded cage and a life of dutiful service to marry and live a ‘normal’ life in America. The match is controversial for various reasons, not least the royal’s mental health and the non-royal’s family problems; but, after a certain amount of reflection, the marriage goes ahead. The couple settles into a new life stateside, and… Sound familiar? The tale of Princess Mako, the 29-year-old niece of Japanese emperor Naruhito, and her fiancé Kei Komuro is a sort of miniaturised inverted Japanese version of the Meghan and Harry story, albeit with a few twists.

Japan will soon have yet another new prime minster: Fumio Kishida. He will be the country's third leader in as many years, and news of his appointment has been met with neither enthusiasm nor much concern – mainly because nobody really knows who he is, or what to expect from him. Kishida, the 64-year old former foreign secretary, was the most experienced of the four short-listed candidates. He has been a minister in various posts for the last fifteen years without anyone particularly noticing his existence. Kishida is a mild-mannered, self-effacing, former banker. He is a hereditary politician with three generations of his family having served in high office, and has clearly had his eyes on the top job for a while.

While Taliban posing with newly acquired US military hardware has been a searing humiliation for America in recent days, here in Japan the debacle in Afghanistan has led to a different source of embarrassment. A recurring image of coverage from Kabul is of Toyota pick-up trucks ferrying gun-toting fighters around the city. It has given the iconic company’s management a serious PR problem, and not for the first time. The Taliban have been favouring the sturdy and reliable Japanese ‘Land Cruisers’ since the 1990s, but it is also the vehicle of choice for Al Qaeda and Isis. The appeal seems to be the suitability for rough terrain and the ease with which the trucks can be retrofitted with gun placements, or in other ways customised for combat or intimidation.

Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga has fallen on his sword. Suga announced today that he will not be seeking reelection as leader of his party (the LDP), in effect resigning as prime minister in the process. The decision came without warning but wasn’t a huge surprise: Suga’s government is polling horribly at the moment and it was feared that the dour and unpopular leader would be a significant drag on his party’s prospects in the upcoming general election. Suga’s farewell after just a year in the job makes it feel like the good old days again, when a revolving door at the prime ministerial residence in Nagatacho saw Japanese premieres enter and exit at a rate of about one a year.

For the first time in history, an organised crime ‘yakuza’ boss has been sentenced to death in a Japanese court. Satoru Nomura, head of the Kudo-kai group in Fukuoka, was found guilty of murder and three assaults after a trial held without a jury due to fears of possible intimidation. If a planned appeal fails, he will be hanged. We’ll find out about it after it happens. What makes the case remarkable is that no evidence was presented linking Nomura directly with the crimes he was accused of. The judge nonetheless concluded that they took place on his orders and had the confidence to deliver the ultimate sentence. The case marks a new low in the seemingly terminal decline of the once fearsome crime syndicates.

Just like the Olympics, which ended a fortnight ago, the Paralympics is set to commence amid a drumbeat of doom. Japan appears to be in the middle of a Covid renaissance, with around 5,000 new cases a day in Tokyo. The games will take place, like the Olympics, in a ‘state of emergency’ that now covers 84 per cent of the country. But how serious is the situation, and what exactly does 5,000 daily cases mean? Like much of the vaccinated world, the majority of the afflicted this time round appear to be younger people and overall deaths in Japan remain extremely low.

Spain takes on Brazil today in the final of the men’s Olympic football tournament. Not interested? Well, if so, you’re probably not alone — Olympic football has a popularity problem. For decades it has suffered from unfavourable comparisons with the big Fifa and Uefa behemoths to the extent that many see the whole thing as a bit of a waste of time. I disagree, and I will be tuning in. For one thing, to dismiss the tournament as an irrelevance is historically ignorant. Olympic football (and excuse my appalling sexism but I’m confining myself to the men’s game here) predates the World Cup by 30 years and for a couple of decades was the de facto world championship, playing a valuable role in building the foundations of the international game.